An oil pipeline that runs along the coast of central California broke on Tuesday, according to officials, dumping tens of thousands of gallons of crude onto local beaches and creating a 4-mile slick in the Pacific Ocean.

Initial estimates put the spill at about 21,000 gallons Tuesday, but the Associated Press cited a U.S. Coast Guard spokesperson on Wednesday who said that figure is likely to change after a Wednesday morning flyover gave a better sense of the spill's scope.

Lots of Repukes who hate enviromentalists live in Santa Barbra. Maybe they can dine on some nice tasty seafood soon, basted in light crude…

The Prince of Darkness just O.K.ed oil drilling along the California Coast and in Alaska’s North Shore…

Without a doubt, this guy is the worst president we have ever had. If the Oil slicks don’t kill all the wildlife there, then the Fukushima fallout will. He caused this. He won’t lift a finger to rectify anything. At least Bush was shamed into visiting Katrina victims. This president has no shame.

I don’t think oil should be transported anywhere by any means. I’d rather that the oil be used where its produced to push electrons down a wire to where the electricity will be used. Of course though, this doesn’t solve the problem of carbon emissions. Anyone care to say “oh but power is increasingly lost the longer that wire is”? To which my responses are: energy is spent transporting fossil fuels and move closer to where the energy is produced, Mr. Stick-in-the-Mud.

In total agreement TJ-
What worries me is the two large diameter flow lines under the Mackinaw Straits which were built back in the 50’s- 75% of this Nations fresh surface water is in the Great Lakes and these two lines of crude are down there, at lake bottom, just waiting to bust loose from old corroded pipe anchored by old corroded concrete to spew their chemical cocktail into the Lakes- Equally worrisome is that these are maintained and owned by the same folks that polluted the Kalamazoo River here in Michigan A couple of years ago-Enbridge…The dilbit/tar sands spill that “Can’t be cleaned up”-

“Every day 61-year-old pipelines push nearly 23 million gallons of oil through the heart of the Great Lakes. What if they ruptured?
Aging pipelines owned by Canadian company Enbridge lie exposed in the water at the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet. These pipelines, called Line 5, were built in 1953 during the Eisenhower administration.
When another Enbridge pipeline ruptured in 2010, it spilled about 1 million gallons of heavy crude oil into the Kalamazoo River. It was the largest land-based oil spill in U.S. history, and is still being cleaned up. Enbridge’s Line 5 through the Straits of Mackinac is 15 years older than its pipeline that gushed oil into the Kalamazoo River.
Despite assurances they could detect a leak “almost instantaneously,” Enbridge initially misdiagnosed the massive spill into the Kalamazoo River, restarting pumps twice and allowing 17 hours to lapse before final shutdown. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency compared their poor handling of the disaster to the bumbling of the “Keystone Kops.”
This was just one of 1,068 Enbridge spills that dumped 7.4 million gallons of oil between 1999 and 2013 – an average of 71 spills and 500,000 gallons leaked per year. That’s more than one oil spill every week for the last 15 years.
Where will the next Enbridge spill occur?
Now it’s even more urgent. Enbridge recently increased the flow in their aging Straits of Mackinac pipelines.
In 2013, Enbridge upgraded pumps along Line 5 and increased the product flow under the Straits by 10 percent from 490,000 to 540,000 barrels per day, or 2.1 million gallons per day”.Oil & Water Don't Mix

It's shocking to think that every day, aging Enbridge pipelines push nearly 23 million gallons of oil through the Great Lakes at Michigan's Straits of Mackinac. With a questionable safety record, and more pressure in the aging pipelines, we need your...

Remember, the 0.001% that own and control this country feel that unnecessary expenses like maintenance, wages, pensions, just cuts into profits and are therefore eliminated to the greatest possible degree. After all, replacing rotting pipe to avoid spills is very expensive and we can’t have that, can we. Spills can be written off as business expenses on any taxes that might be paid.

You find this appearing all over the world. Same thing with nuclear plants. These aging plants are routinely given long extensions and in some cases are allowed to run at 25-30% over their designed power output, even when some of them are literally falling apart. They are expensive to fix, so run 'em to death. Under the law, the taxpayers pay for the damages and the clean up, if any is possible.

Fukushima was brought to you courtesy of GE, who also built most of the reactors in the US. Thy are all basically the same design.

In short, as long as the 0.001% is allowed to call the shots, our ass is grass.;-})

The hubris of Oil Drillers and Frackers is appalling given the FACTS. More and more pipelines will burst because the GROUND is not stable. Earth Mother is a sentient being and with her myriad ecosystems dying or straining against so much abuse, SHE is shaking and quaking all over. And the “fun” is just beginning:

This is a multi billion dollar catastrophie due to corporate neglegence!The oil company that spilled this oil should be dealt with in the most heavy handed way possible!They should have their assets seized,& pay the entire price of environmental damages, compensate all business’s in the area that rely on tourism for life , compensate fishing & diving industries for a lifetime of lost revenue all property owners for loss of value & be barred or expelled from doing business in the state of CA for ever again! That oil company should be run out of CA.
NOW people of CA what can we do to make this happen!!

Personality Politics is limited. The truth is that the gears have been greased for all-out control by government-corporation-military elites along with their media enablers and bank financiers. This problem is global in scope although resistance is occurring in Greece, Iceland, Venezuela, and other ideological fault-line zones.

Obama was brought in to give a gentle face to the creep of fascism. His granting a pardon to the Bush Junta’s wars of choice (based on fixed evidence), and just a slap on the wrist to the big banks (without putting Glass Steagall back into place), and “looking past” torture (maintaining it as viable within the current playbooks), and forcing citizens to purchase “health” insurance, and placing a Black face over the nation as symbol whilst the actual policing forces took more blatant brutal aim at communities of color (treating young Black males inside “the Homeland” just like those Brown men found inside nations targeted in the “War on Terror” and “taken out” by drones) … keeps all of these inversions of the Rule of Law in place for the next paid jackass to utilize.

Add in TPP and TIPP and any lawful means of redress–when it comes to challenging corporations’ claim to profit above every other ideal or objective–and the deal is sealed. Humanity is shoved back into the age of Conquistadors with every “tribe” of natives forced to fight to keep the BEAST off their land, out of their water table, away from enslaving their children, etc.

This is how Inverted Totalitarianism comes into place… through a mission creep that exists below the radar forcing citizens to gradually accommodate to things like ubiquitous surveillance, pat-downs at airports, police inside schools (but always and ever, that homage to THE GUN turned into the quintessential “liberty” of this land), and decisions reached behind closed doors that impact all citizens… closing off their say in the matters.

Prince of darkness… perhaps, but do not let that take your sight off the greater evil which is now embedded into a system of corruptions that goes way beyond what this particular Master of Ceremonies is enacting.

This was built in 1991. This a fraction of the time some pipelines are in use. Pipelines ALL will fail and that this was put UNDER the ocean shows the absolute contempt for which those companies hold nature. They knew it MUST fail yet built it anyways and it was APPROVED.

Meanwhile on the other side of the Pacific they have still not found the cores at Fukishima. The once in a 100 year event has turned into an event that will continue for literally tens of thousands of years as radiation pours into the ocean. Billions of animals are being washed up dead on the shores of the Americas.

Carl Sagan once speculated that the reason we have not yer encountered Alien life on other planets is that they may have reached a stage in their evolution where they killed themselves off due to a Nuclear war. I am kind of thinking what in fact happened is that they likely developed societies based on Capitalism, the Corporation and the notion that they were given DOMINION over their respective Earths for personal gain. It was an arms race of a different sort, one where the race was to see which company could churn the most profits in the shortest period of time by destroying nature , one every bit as anti-life as a war itself.

Yet these ecocidal bastards negotiate the TPP which will see even less regulation on Industry so as to enhance PROFITS.

Right now, feeling as I do after looking at that picture of that oil covered bird, were you to show me the picture of a child starving in some foreign land, I would have more empathy for that bird. As THIS all happens another CNN headline details the story of a man who got to SHooT a Rhinoceros after paying several hundred thousand for a license. You can watch him make his kill on line (where they spin it to make it seem the man some sort of “heman” hero) and they have the gall to claim this done so as to protect Rhino’s from extinction.

There we go again, another ruptured oil pipeline. Since it broke near the mansions in Santa Barbara, heavily populated by clueless Republicans, we might actually see how fast these sold out buffoons get their acts together. Mindless insanity caused by a rudderless government of clowns.

Yes Mini- That was my experience at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska when I spilled the beans on A fraudulent pipeline Inspection Company that was in cahoots with British Petroleum in cooking the books on Corrosion Data and just how bad things were there- There was also an issue with several miles of 36" 4,000 PSI Gas pipeline that was ready to go to failure for lack of concern- During the finally forced inspection 2- 6" feeder lines blew up on Well pads from pressure alone- Had that line and Central Gas Facility (largest on the planet) gone to failure, it would have taken out many of the Large Diameter Oil Flow lines and dumped them into the Arctic Ocean- The line also ran within yards of most of the man camps, so many deaths would have occurred…That Gas Line and Plant had the destructive equivalent of Nuclear Bombs- BP does NOT care for this Planet or it’s workers safety or anything else that doesn’t have “Profit” attached to it-
The BP President of Alaska was Removed for not informing the CEO of BP America- They moved him out of Alaska and made him the Chief Operations Officer in the Gulf, just in time for the Deep Water Horizon disaster- I wish I could have stopped that one too-
As A Whistleblower, I lost it all and was blacklisted by BP for doing what their Safety Manual stated was your “Duty”- This wonderful Government Court System along with Congressmen were totally Owned by this modern day equivalent of the British East India Company, BP- Seeking Justice was total futility…
There is much more to this story, 35 years of my experiences- I may someday write A book about all of the bullshit that went on up there…

Internal investigations warned BP for years that the company had created a culture of disregard for safety and environmental rules and risked a serious accident if it did not change its ways. While the investigations focuses on BP's Alaska drilling...

Thanks minitrue for so wonderfully and clearly explaining the habits of the too big and too fat and too dirty global corporations.They see spending as a dirty word. I have been noticing this trend since AT&T and Bell Labs “axed” tens of thousands of workers as if they were infested with deadly diseases and had to be taken out mainly in favor of lower cost foreign workers.That trend continued and worsened and is still continuing. While people were left unemployed the CEOs doing the axing received huge incentives and wall street rewards. At the same time while the GOP was pushing hard for deregulation I could see the writings on the walls and the ugly consequences but people were fed this bull shit notion of the American way, free enterprise crap. I saw deregulation as the mother of all disasters that followed, be they financial, public utilities, oil and gas, airlines, banking, etc, they’ve all met the same fate and they’ve all been a huge bonanza for big business to the detriment of e everyone and everything else.

Why not? Just what is the Federal Government doing these days for the people of any State?
I really can’t think of many Governors or State Governments that have created and overseen the mess for their States that our Federal Government has been involved in since Reagan…(Don’t get me wrong here, there are many, many totally worthless Governors out there)

I wouldn’t be surprised if many States looked into seceding once these colonizing Trade Agreements get Fast Tracked by this little Con we have as Chief Executioner…

As it stands now, the laws are written so they do just that. If they force poor Americans to leave, and make sure they wont come back by burdening them with unaddressable levels of debt, problem solved.

Fast Track is the key event that if it occurs, in my opinion, will initiate and then put on autopilot an irreversible chain of events leading to the final theft of the nation and the world from its people - the end of democracy, and the eventual destruction of our country.

This process have been meticulously planned for more than 20 years.

Why should they pay wages for non-existent workers. Work is going away- so setting arbitrary wage levels (which are likely to be attacked as trade barriers by the WTO soon, anyway) is barking up the wrong tree. By 2045, few people will be working unless they have advanced levels of skill - and likely formal certification of same- informal paths to skill will be made almost impossible by “Mode Four” - trade in services dominated by global staffing firms sucking the entry level and mid level technical jobs
into a low wage race to the bottom. Education will become impossibly expensive to attain in the developed countries. (getting stable work in a world of automated business will require either bribery, inside connections or being basically the best in the world in your area, i.e. irreplaceable.)